Search Results: football

Fell into riveting conversation recently. We talked about Australia's and Oregon's history with assisted suicide, the plight of Indigenous Australians, and his views on the personal and public profiles of Cardinal George Pell. Here's how it happened.

'Gran' from ABC1's Angry Boys is irreverent enough to be her charges' friend, authoritative enough to demand respect, compassionate enough to earn real affection. Australian comedian Chris Lilley differs from other satirists such as The Chaser. Their humour is often nasty. His is marked by warmth.

In the tiny church built of ecumenical brick, with barely any aesthetic pleasure to distract from the humility of the message, Patrick and his cohort in both the earlier football match and in the communion to come, sat quietly, though with the telltale legs of novices swinging restlessly under the front pew.

Jesuit Social Services recently set up a project in Alice Springs to resource the local parish and local Aborigines who want to take more control of their own lives. If we are to get our teeth into issues of acute injustice, we need to eyeball both the decision makers and those affected by those decisions.

The proposal that a match at the MCG could project an Easter message is ludicrous. The Easter message calls for time and prayerful reflection. Even Islamic and Jewish leaders have supported the special status of Good Friday.

It is raining. The ball has doubled its weight and is like kicking a basket of wet washing. And it's slippery, like grappling a live fish. The boys have kept this bayside game going many years, but I've only rocked up in the past couple. A ball hurtling towards me from on-high raises a new set of fears.

The NRL and national soccer competition already play matches on Good Friday, a move which they made without input from church groups. Now is the time for churches to collaborate with the AFL on a Good Friday match, or else it will be left behind again.

Sleep was not in two-year-old Laura's holiday plans: she inhabited several time zones, none of them ours. One night, at 11, when she was getting revved up for another two hours of play, I decided to take her to the shops. I should mention that Laura has Down syndrome.

The girl at the centre of the ongoing AFL sex scandal presents herself as a woman scorned. In truth she's a child in need of protection. Child protection laws once enabled police to ask a court to have a girl made a ward of state if she appeared to be 'in moral danger'.

In earlier generations, Australian priests were treated as tribal heroes. But the sexual abuse scandals and their inept management by Church authorities have dealt lethal blows. The paradigm is broken and needs a full review.

When I first moved to Greece, my language skills were reduced to those of a three-year-old. The pain of this was exacerbated when six months after our arrival, my six and eight-year-old sons started speaking to each other in Greek.

Do Australians hate Americans? No, because Americans invented basketball. What do Australians eat? Yeast paste. It tastes like someone ground up a penguin and then left it in the rain for a month before adding rubber and dirt to it.